10 B2B Blogging Best Practices To Generate Business Leads

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Likewise, a well-crafted Business to Business (B2B) blog or website with great content is futile if you do not get any visitors.

But how can you do so if you’re not in a hip and happening niche like fashion, food, fitness, travel or photography?

What if you are selling industrial machinery or providing legal or accounting advice?

Hear it from this B2B Blogger

Like many of you, I’m acutely aware of the challenges of attracting and sustaining visitor traffic to a B2B website or a blog. After all, I’ve been blogging in this space for well over 10 years, sharing my insights on topics like content marketing, social media marketing, PR, and branding.

Initially, I adopted a fairly serendipitous strategy. I veered from topic to topic. I wrote about whatever I was inspired to write.

Over time, I learned about the importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media Optimization (SMO). I also learned that I need to stick to a more consistent topic in order to attract a regular audience. And to write longer and more useful pieces.

While I may not draw the same volume of traffic as most B2C websites or blogs, I have written enough content for B2B and professional clients to know a thing or two about this space. Plus, I am drawing in enough clients for my content marketing agency to keep my team pretty busy.

So what can you do to build a consistent stream of visitors to your B2B blog?

#1 Identify Your Niche then Zoom Out a Little

First , you’ll need to identify where your content niche lies.

As a B2B business, you are gunning to serve “long-tail” clients. In other words, your potential clients are likely to be seeking highly specialised products or services (eg conveyancing for a legal firm, or wafer fab manufacturing for a chip maker).

Once you’ve identified your industry, you should then explore how you can “zoom out” to include other affiliated services or products that your customer would be interested in. From there, you can then craft your blog pieces.

#2 Address Your Customer’s Specific Pain Points

As a content strategist for a B2B business, you’ll need to focus a lot more specifically on your customer pain points.

These would be the typical questions and challenges that your customers would face, either in your specific domain (eg tax accounting) or a broader context (eg reducing business costs).

A good example here is FreshBooks – provider of cloud accounting software for small businesses. I love how their blog addresses issues that their small business clients face, covering topics like growth, financial management, taxes, marketing and other areas.

#3 Write Longer and More Valuable Pieces

In case you don’t already know, the world of B2B blogging revolves around long content.

Here, I’m talking about blog posts which are minimally 1,000 words in length. Or even better, at least 1,500 to 2,000 words.

Now before you think that I’m nuts for suggesting that you burn your entire day writing an article, have a look at these statistics on the length of articles versus social shares. These are backed by studies from Moz, Serp IQ and Medium.

#4 Use SEO Techniques to Gain Traffic

This brings us to our next point: Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Even though I’m a social media marketer by trade, the bulk of my web traffic comes from search engines. As I slowly identify and fix some of my SEO issues, I’m confident that my traffic will only improve in the months to come.

#5 Craft Compelling Human Stories

We all love a good story – even when we are in a professional line of work.

It is the reason why my most well-read story on LinkedIn (at 40,836 views in all) was modelled after my own story as a former public officer who pivoted to become a modestly successful content marketing consultant.

Here are some strategies you can adopt to craft a compelling B2B brand story (adapted from my blog post here):

One of the best examples of a B2B business story was NPR Planet Money’s Story of the T-shirt. It traced the fascinating economic and physical journey of a humble T-shirt, and how it arrived at the desk of the radio station.

Pinterest is great for pinning your infographics and getting them widely pinned.

Twitter works well for broadcasting your latest blog posts, and to ride on popular trending topics (see newsjacking above).

Even Instagram can work well for B2B businesses if you use it well. Look at how tech and consulting powerhouse IBM is rocking their Instagram account with their focus on customer and staff stories, told in amazing technicolour.

#10 Build Your Online Communities

Last, but certainly not least, you’ll need to focus on building your online communities.

This needs to go beyond your website or blog to include your social media channels and email lists. They may include your followers on Twitter, fans on your Facebook page, or subscribers on your YouTube channel.

To build a thriving online community, you’ll need to identify your community’s interests, create content which meets their needs (think ‘solutions’ rather than ‘products’), and be consistent in publishing content and responding to feedback. You can read more about building online communities here.

A good example of a B2B brand doing this is Eye for Travel – an online community serving the travel industry in areas like technology, marketing, retail and other trends. By identifying specific topics that are of interest to their community, they could generate a consistent and loyal base of content readers and customers.

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Founder of Cooler Insights, I am a geek marketer with almost 24 years of senior management experience in marketing, public relations and strategic planning. Since becoming an entrepreneur 5 years ago, my team and I have helped 58 companies and over 2,200 trainees in digital marketing, focusing on content, social media and brand storytelling.

2 Comments

Marketer are always looking to improve lead generation . The blog is one of the best investment you can make. But blogging only produces lead generation results when it’s planned and executed properly. Here are some practices to improve lead generation like blog regularly, include a CTA, image, promote, content strategy and etc.